Posted
by
samzenpuson Monday July 21, 2014 @12:53PM
from the greased-lightning dept.

An anonymous reader writes Verizon is boosting the upload speeds of nearly all its FiOS connections to match the download speeds, greatly shortening the time it takes to send videos and back up files online. All new subscribers will get "symmetrical" connections. If you previously were getting 15 Mbps down and 5 Mbps up, you'll be automatically upgraded for no extra cost to 15/15. Same goes if you were on their 50/25 plan: You'll now be upgraded to 50/50. And if you had 75/35? You guessed it: Now it'll be 75 down, and 75 up.

Given that Lvel3 and Verizon are currently holding PR-offs over their peering, this may be related to that. Verizon says "The peering is not symmetrical so L3 should pay us for all the data they are pushing [sic] over our network." L3's response is that Verizon is NOT a symmetrical peer and never can be because their end is full of consumers that pull more data and don't even have upload capability as fast as the download capability.

Have their application send outgoing packets to an IP on their ISP which just get fed to the bit bucket by the border router. So, if you download a movie at 2Mbps, the client sends random data at 4Mbps back. That forces your ISP to upload more than it downloads, and thus they have to negotiate peering.

This is fiber. I don't have Verizon myself, but in general everything people complain about in regards to ISPs goes away once you're fiber. They'd have to have some pretty serious congestion issues for FiOS to start having trouble.

Along that same line though, I've no idea why they had asymmetric on fiber to begin with. The point to ADSL (Asymmetric DSL) has to do with crosstalk on the copper lines in the DSLAM. This isn't an issue, at all, for Fiber. So it makes little sense to have asymmetric fiber service

The biggest issue I have with Verizon Fios is the TV service. All of the video channels are so compressed that you inevitably get pixelation and tearing. This is particularly infuriating when it happens during playback for video on demand shows that you are paying extra for.

And Verizon customer service is a complete joke. They don't even understand that it is their compression causing the problems, and their only solution when you call to complain is to reboot the cable box. After never less than 35 minutes on hold, then 30-50 minutes working with the idiot in Mumbai, then getting "accidentally" disconnected... makes me want to scream.

> The biggest issue I have with Verizon Fios is the TV service. All of the video channels are so compressed that you inevitably get pixelation and tearing. This is particularly infuriating when it happens during playback for video on demand shows that you are paying extra for.

I think this is pretty much true no matter what the medium. We've noticed high compression rates on satellite (both dish and directv), Comcast (awhile back...) and FIOS. We finally dumped cable entirely. For what network TV my family still watches, we have a big antenna pointing at the TV towers on the ridge over there. The signal is head and shoulders over anything I've seen from cable or dish, with the possible exception of sports on dish (for which additional bandwidth is allowed).

I guess my learning from all of this is that traditional real time TV, with the possible exception of direct off-air broadcasts, just haven't moved with the times. There are no doubt business reasons for this, but it calls into question, why cable at all? High cost for low quality? Just say no.

> Someone is a fan of a particular talk show host on one of the cable "news" channels.

Depending on which program you're talking about, it might be available via streaming, perhaps for a fee.

> Someone watches sporting events that aren't shown OTA and are blacked out online because they're on cable.

My wife is a football and basketball fanatic. For blacked out shows, she goes to sports bars. The rest she watches either OTA online. One year she got the DirecTV football ticket, and was very upset at the

Depending on which program you're talking about, it might be available via streaming, perhaps for a fee.

The programs are Morning Joe, The Rachel Maddow Show, and Monday Night Football. Is there a (legal) live stream of MSNBC and ESPN sold separately from pay TV?

For blacked out shows, she goes to sports bars.

That's great for people with no kids under 21.

This is a leftover from what I call the "tv tray generation", people who watch TV shows on the content provider's schedule, with commercials.

There are plenty of "TV tray generation" people in my family. Some are unwiling to spend an extra $180 per year for TiVo service. But I was referring to things like Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones, where one may have to actively avoid spoilers that come up in casual conversation at work.

Usually (but admittedly not always) there's a way to get internet without also having to get cable.

> But I was referring to things like Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones, where one may have to actively avoid spoilers that come up in casual conversation at work.

Netflix. (I must be one of the only people on earth who doesn't watch either Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones. But I know people who are addicted, and I'm told the experience is much better when binge-watching. Major advantage: No cliff-hangers.)

My local OTA channels are just as heavily compressed as the cable channels. Local stations are able to fit multiple subchannels into one regular channel, and to accomplish this, they reduce the bandwidth of the main channel. We're left with an overcompressed main channel and two amateur quality subchannels that show local ads and weather which earns the local station some extra income. It's going to get worse with everyone trying to cram more channels into their transmission medium without adding more he

Regarding OTA, one's mileage may vary. I watch very little TV, but as a geek I'm interested a bit in the technical side, and observe that our OTA channels are much sharper than any cable/satellite service we've ever had (and we've had everything that's been available, because wife and daughter are pretty much addicted). But I concede that I've not looked everywhere, and it might be different elsewhere.

But you bring up a good point. I felt back when HD was being heavily promoted that there was a really go

Really? I have had FIOS for 5 years and never noticed pixelation....I thought the whole plus with having fiber to the home was that there was enough bandwidth to send the streams with little or no compression.

The biggest issue I have with Verizon Fios is the TV service. All of the video channels are so compressed that you inevitably get pixelation and tearing

What are you comparing this to? The television signal on FIOS is superior to almost every other cable company since FIOS is one of the only services that sends the original stream and not a recompressed video. If you think the FIOS video signal is bad, you should try Comcast or, even worse, one of the satellite networks.

This is fiber. I don't have Verizon myself, but in general everything people complain about in regards to ISPs goes away once you're fiber. They'd have to have some pretty serious congestion issues for FiOS to start having trouble.

It matters not how fast your download speed from your ISP is if said ISP's connection to the content [level3.com] you are requesting isn't able to deliver it.

Along that same line though, I've no idea why they had asymmetric on fiber to begin with. The point to ADSL (Asymmetric DSL) has to do with crosstalk on the copper lines in the DSLAM. This isn't an issue, at all, for Fiber. So it makes little sense to have asymmetric fiber service other than for marketing purposes.

Consumer ISP's are all about getting content to you. They don't want you throwing up a server at your house to stream data to the ethers. They want you to stream media from them. So much so most have U NO RUN SERVER clauses in their TOS. An asynchronous connection allows them to advertise higher bandwidth "download" speeds and keeps those nasty server runners with paltry pipes to get their filth up to the internet.

I built that network (Pando Networks) a few years ago. The content companies were generally pretty slow to adopt p2p technology, but game companies are all over it. One pleasant aspect was that the advantage of p2p wasn't just economics, though those were great, it was performance. Because downloading from dozens of sources is much more resilient, and on good networks more performant, than downloading from one source. And, with an intelligent network, it could connect you with peers that are close to you in the network, reducing network congestion at the interconnects by 80%. When we ran a large scale test across all the major ISPs, we in fact saw that p2p clients were able to reduce inter-ISP data exchanges (for the p2p network) by 80%, simply through intelligent peer selection, which ISPs loved, and download performance was better, which downloaders loved.

I posit that there really is a lot of overlap. I'd be willing to bet that the 80/20 rule applies at the border routers, with 80% of viewers accessing the same 20% of the content. Imagine the days/weeks when a new season of Orange Is The New Black is released, for example.

Moving data. When I'm moving a 1TB file of binary data, I would prefer I didn't have to leave it running overnight.I do this every few weeks. As it stands I usually end up using walknet with a hard disk, but that doesn't work when the onward journey is to the other side of the county.

biggest problem with upload is you send it over free links with Tier 1 networks, or you pay them to take your traffic. with all the user generated stuff now like Twitch, flickr, video calling and other services where you want a fast upload speed that's a lot of data to be paying for.

with the current L3/Verizon dispute i wonder if they struck a deal where verizon will allow the connections to be upgraded for netflix to work on their network in exchange for L3 taking all their uploaded data for free.

biggest problem with upload is you send it over free links with Tier 1 networks, or you pay them to take your traffic. with all the user generated stuff now like Twitch, flickr, video calling and other services where you want a fast upload speed that's a lot of data to be paying for.

with the current L3/Verizon dispute i wonder if they struck a deal where verizon will allow the connections to be upgraded for netflix to work on their network in exchange for L3 taking all their uploaded data for free.

Hmm...that actually makes for an interesting case.

So Level3 basically pointed out the issue with User focused ISP's - that they're asymetric and would never provide the ability for those ISPs to compete in the peering arrangements that back-bone providers have. So now if they go to being symetric, it would allow the users to do more and possibly try to combat what the ISP (e.g Verizon) thinks is a fallacy but they can only prove if they make all their links symetric.

Problem for the ISP is users don't really upload a whole lot any way. So it's not going to change anything for a while. It may get Level3 to drop the "symetric vs asymetric" part of their argument, but it won't change the amount of traffic going from the ISP to back-bone provider.

What will be telling is if they do the same to the DSL customers in the near future as well. Otherwise they are still primarily an asymetric provider as they have more DSL than FiOS customers.

Question is: Will Verizon only do this temporarily as part of an argument with Level3? If so, expect a change in the future when their plan doesn't work out. If not, then hopefully other ISPs will follow in order to "compete".

What will be telling is if they do the same to the DSL customers in the near future as well.

DSL works over high frequencies in existing copper phone lines. Far more physical bandwidth is typically allocated to the downstream than to the upstream. Balancing this out would reduce download speeds in favor of upload speeds. Are you sure implementing SHDSL [wikipedia.org] wouldn't require rolling trucks and mailing modems?

What will be telling is if they do the same to the DSL customers in the near future as well.

DSL works over high frequencies in existing copper phone lines. Far more physical bandwidth is typically allocated to the downstream than to the upstream. Balancing this out would reduce download speeds in favor of upload speeds. Are you sure implementing SHDSL [wikipedia.org] wouldn't require rolling trucks and mailing modems?

Except Businesses have had access to higher speed symetric DSL for a lot longer; though that's typically a dedicated line instead of one sharing its bandwidth with a voice line.

For a company like L3 it won't matter much either way as the data providers that they link to the data consumers are spread around thier network and peers. So thier data haluage is probably fairly well balanced. Thier peering with consumer ISPs is highly biased but also distributed pretty well around thier network in most places.

As a not-FiOS customer this would matter to me if Verizon was ever planning to expand their build-out past its current boundaries.

Verizon CFO Fran Shammo recently [March 2014] told folks at a Deutsche Bank conference on telecom services that âoeI am not going to build beyond the current LSAs (local service acquistions) that we have built out.â

Uploading is still a fraction of what downloading is... Most home consumers, even those with IoT devices or heavy P2P users, are still net consumers of online information. (Think Netflix, Windows Updates, VPN, remote desktop, etc.) I see it as a gift I didn't care to receive but one that I wouldn't pass up. So, I have to ask, what's the point?

A more valuable gift would be continue the lack of symmetry, and bump existing download & upload speeds by some percentage. Until Netflix becomes P2P, most

Uploading is still a fraction of what downloading is... Most home consumers, even those with IoT devices or heavy P2P users, are still net consumers of online information. (Think Netflix, Windows Updates, VPN, remote desktop, etc.) I see it as a gift I didn't care to receive but one that I wouldn't pass up. So, I have to ask, what's the point?

How else are they gonna get all the constant live-streaming from your various computer & console webcams & microphones up the pipe without you noticing?

Both Verizon FIOS users were reportedly very happy (other than their experience using Netflix).

Really? I live outside the city (as in no water or gas infrastructure) and I still have FiOS, here in Northern Virginia.

Yeah, they apparently weren't able to roll out FIOS to anything other than outlying suburbs across most of the U.S. Not very many people are able to get FIOS, and they stopped expanding their service area a few years ago, and even sold off parts of their fiber network to other companies in certain markets. If you aren't in a FIOS service area now, you probably never will be.

Wow, I wonder, if my fellow citizens of the command-and-control persuasion still think, the government mandating the higher speeds would've been more effective in delivering the bandwidth to consumers...

Completely agree. FiOS is 1/8th mile away from my house but they won't bring it the last couple hundred feet. I'd be stuck on ADSL, but I am using 100+ GB/month on my unlimited data, symmetrical 30 Mbps LTE, tethering my 5 GHz 802.11ac smartphone (Galaxy S5) to my 5 GHz 802.11ac wifi adapter on my computer. I uploaded an hour-long HD video to youtube yesterday in about an hour. If Verizon Wireless doesn't want me tying up ~40% of the bandwidth on the local tower, they're more than welcome to ask their non-W

FiOS is 1/8th mile away from my house but they won't bring it the last couple hundred feet.

Sounds like you need to strike up a deal with one of your neighbors, to sign-up for FIOS and host a WiFi AP aimed towards your house for you. Give them free internet access (throttled when you're maxing it out) or just a few dollars more than the bill, and you'll both come out ahead.

North Carolina was promised FIOS "real soon now" for years. At this point, it's pretty clear that if you don't already have it, you won't be getting it. Google blimps, drones, and sewer lines will bring us high-speed broadband long before Verizon significantly extends their buildout.

At this point, it's pretty clear that if you don't already have it, you won't be getting it.

Not true here. It was quite a while after their announced buildout freeze that FIOS became available here. A neighboring city had it for a while, and since then, it has expanded a few cities away, and filled-in all the coverage gaps, too.

Frankly, I hate FIOS, because they immediately take away nice cheap DSL as an option. Why the hell does my mother need to pay $65/month for the slowest FIOS package, when she's ne

But the corporate official VPN uses some strange protocol. Once the VPN is connected ALL the traffic from the local machine will go the corporate VPN host.

It's not the VPN protocol, his VPN software changes the default route. He should change it back to the Verizon IP after connecting to the VPN and set an explicit route for the VPN lan (making a script with the settings would be easiest)

But the corporate official VPN uses some strange protocol. Once the VPN is connected ALL the traffic from the local machine will go the corporate VPN host.

This isn't strange, it is considering SOP for most corporations to ban "split-tunneling", where only traffic to the corporate network are sent over VPN.It also isn't a protocol, it is just a default route to send all traffic over the VPN.

The theory is that by allowing someone to have unfiltered access at the same time as they are connected to the internal corporate network, they are creating a security risk.

The reality is that the "crunchy outside, warm gooey inside" security model as been broken for some t

All the companies I've worked for didn't allow a split-tunnel VPN from corporate laptops.

Split-tunnel pretty much kills the whole point of using a VPN.

Depends on what you're doing. I allow a split-tunnel into my home VPN because I use that VPN connection strictly to access internal resources remotely. I have no need to route all my web traffic through my home connection when all I want to do is SSH into a box, or copy a file off a network share or something like that. When I am on the road and on an untrusted connection, I just VPN into the home network and run RDP and use the remote machine to access online banking, email, or other services.

All the companies I've worked for didn't allow a split-tunnel VPN from corporate laptops.

Split-tunnel pretty much kills the whole point of using a VPN.

Depends on what you're doing. I allow a split-tunnel into my home VPN because I use that VPN connection strictly to access internal resources remotely. I have no need to route all my web traffic through my home connection when all I want to do is SSH into a box, or copy a file off a network share or something like that. When I am on the road and on an untrusted connection, I just VPN into the home network and run RDP and use the remote machine to access online banking, email, or other services.

Sorry, I thought we were talking about corporate networks and didn't think it was necessary to describe all the different ways in which a VPN might be used.

All the companies I've worked for didn't allow a split-tunnel VPN from corporate laptops.

Split-tunnel pretty much kills the whole point of using a VPN.

Depends on what you're doing. I allow a split-tunnel into my home VPN because I use that VPN connection strictly to access internal resources remotely. I have no need to route all my web traffic through my home connection when all I want to do is SSH into a box, or copy a file off a network share or something like that. When I am on the road and on an untrusted connection, I just VPN into the home network and run RDP and use the remote machine to access online banking, email, or other services.

Sorry, I thought we were talking about corporate networks and didn't think it was necessary to describe all the different ways in which a VPN might be used.

Well, I suppose the point I am trying to make is there may be corporate edge cases where they want split tunnel. In general, most employees aren't smart enough to realize when to use what, and so the best policy from an IT perspective is to keep the user from shooting themselves in the foot with the VPN. Hell I've known IT people who weren't smart enough to configure the VPN properly to force traffic through the connection, and then failed to properly test whether traffic was leaking out of the tunnel.

Who said anything about removing usage limits? If past experience is any indication, this will just let people reach their limits faster. Does Verizon even have limits on uploads, or is it up and down all lumped together?

I hope all Internet service company in the world to adopt this fair service to all their customers. No more upload limit:)

"Fair" is a very subjective word. Who says it is fair to have everyone paying for service that they wont' use? Most people don't need the same upstream speed as they need down. Not even those who are using Netflix or downloading large Linux distributions need the same up as down. Only those sending out large amounts of data will see any difference, and that's only if the transmission is monitored in real-time and not just a background task.

"Fair" is a very subjective word. Who says it is fair to have everyone paying for service that they wont' use? Most people don't need the same upstream speed as they need down. Not even those who are using Netflix or downloading large Linux distributions need the same up as down. Only those sending out large amounts of data will see any difference, and that's only if the transmission is monitored in real-time and not just a background task.

As someone else pointed out, this change will make very little difference in the load imbalance at the peering points since most people aren't hitting an upload limit to start with.

It seems to me that providing symmetric high-speed connections is critical to the future of free speech, innovation, creative output and communications the world over.

When I can serve up my documentary on government malfeasance and allow dozens, if not hundreds of other people to pull my content easily -- and those folks can then host it for tens or hundreds of thousands more people, it becomes much harder for the "big lie" to succeed.

When I can host my own "social network" that links to those people I give

When I can serve up my documentary on government malfeasance and allow dozens, if not hundreds of other people to pull my content easily -- and those folks can then host it for tens or hundreds of thousands more people, it becomes much harder for the "big lie" to succeed.

Then you would not have agreed to a service that prohibits you from running a server, which every residential service I've seen does. However, the point remains, charging me extra for service I don't need so you can have what you claim is critical to your right to free speech doesn't seem to be fair at all.

I could go on, but if you don't get the idea by now, you're probably brain-dead.

I get the idea that you become insulting when someone doesn't value symmetric data service as much as you do. Was there another point, because if there was your insulting tone did a good job of masking

I went to Verizon's site to check on this for my account. Here's what I got:

My Rewards+

SHARING ONLINE JUST GOT FASTER!

Great news, you are eligible for an upload speed to equal your current download speed, at no additional cost to you! Simply click here and enroll in our My Rewards+ program - it’s easy and free. Just our way of thanking you for being a loyal Verizon customer. Faster upload speed means better sharing experiences. That’s Powerful! Join Now

IMO, it's Verizon (finally) getting smart and taking advantage of their superior fiber network, giving their customers symmetric bandwidth that cable providers can't provide. Cable companies built a cheaper infrastructure, that physically can't provide as much uplink as downlink. So if Verizon can get people to value symmetric bandwidth, instead of just downlink, suddenly they have the winning network!

How would it hurt Netflix? Netflix could push its movies like Blizzard pushes World of Warcraft updates. This would involve sending (encrypted) movies to Verizon customers, having the Netflix clients share the (encrypted) movies over a peer-to-peer network, and stream only the decryption key for each frame of video to the subscribers watching the video.

It's a shame that this "Republican poster" gets so many replies when it is clear even to casual followers of Slashdot that he is a troll who posts the same thing ("Republicans hate X", "Republicans took away Y") in various thread on a daily basis.

For me, a real sign of the death of Slashdot is the predictability of the trolls. The Republican troll and the Space Nutter troll (who may be one and the same, though I've never counted), offer only this invariable single-issue shtick instead of making things wacky

For me, a real sign of the death of Slashdot is the predictability of the trolls.

This statement just reeks of "noob".

The trolling (and gaming of mod and m2) was VASTLY higher in the early/. days. At certain points, it really was crushing any legitimate discussions. You have no idea how good you've got it, on that account.

Some of your "Comcast is worse" points apply equally to Verizon:
6. FiOS TV requires a box.
7. FiOS TV requires a box.
8. All providers offering premium channels have to encrypt. This has been true since the days of analog cable. Blame the channels.
10. You think FiOS boxes run free software?
11. is just 3 restated so we can strike it.
12. The first thing Bell Atlantic did when it became Verizon was buy GTE. Later it bought Alltel.